Beartooth – Pure Ecstasy

Having spent years turning his demons into music, Beartooth seemed to have found the light with The Surface. Three years later, Pure Ecstasy nonetheless reminds us that healing is never a straight line. This time, Caleb Shomo is no longer merely trying to survive what destroys him: he seeks to understand who he is when the lies, the fears, and everything behind which he had built himself disappear. An album of liberation, to be sure, but a freedom that first requires blowing everything up.

The Truth in the Midst of Chaos

The title track “Pure Ecstasy” immediately opens this crack. Behind the idea of ecstasy lies a contradiction that runs through the entire album: discovering a truth capable of making one happy can simultaneously destroy the balance on which an entire life rested. Beartooth thus never fully chooses between euphoria and pain.

“Eyes Closed” crystallizes this feeling perfectly. When the future becomes impossible to anticipate, sometimes the only option is to close your eyes and jump. A vulnerability that contrasts with the much more instinctive violence of “Bullshit,” where the anger seems initially directed outward before becoming a reckoning with oneself. The true lie might not be that of others, but the one we nurture long enough to end up believing in.

With “Free,” this confrontation becomes impossible to dodge. More stripped back, the track leaves less room behind which to hide. The freedom mentioned here is not the ease of an achievement: it resembles more the moment when one finally dares to look at a part of oneself that had been buried for years.

Losing Yourself to Find Yourself

Pure Ecstasy becomes then the strange tale of a reconstruction that begins with destruction. Lose You To Find Me carries this idea even in its title: becoming fully oneself sometimes means accepting to lose someone, a relationship, or even the version of one’s own existence that one thought was definitive.

This duality probably reaches its most sensitive point with “Beautiful Again.” Joy and despair cease to be opposites here. They can coexist, because a renaissance does not automatically erase what it cost. Later on, “For Me By Me” finally refocuses the gaze: after living in fear of what his choices might provoke around him, Shomo seems to begin envisioning a life that genuinely belongs to him.

And it’s hard to imagine a better conclusion than “I Made It.” After fear, anger, losses and this almost brutal search for authenticity, these three words take on another dimension. Not that of a flawless victory where all wounds have disappeared, but that of someone who can finally look back at the path traveled and acknowledge that it is still there.

With Pure Ecstasy, Beartooth does not merely recount how one gets better. The album captures a far more uncomfortable moment where happiness becomes possible precisely because one finally accepts what it may cost. Caleb Shomo had already learned to survive himself. This time, he perhaps learns something even harder: to live by being fully himself.

The Beartooth – Pure Ecstasy article originally appeared on RockUrLife – a rock, metal, alternative, pop, punk, indie webzine.